The Todas las letras project is the result of the Adobe MAX conference in October 2011. Clever developers and designers gather annually to learn about new tools from Adobe. I attended as a member of the Adobe IT staff. At the 2011 event in Los Angeles, Adobe launched its Digital Publishing Suite, or DPS, a group of tools which allows one to design and publish a highly visual and interactive digital publication, and to wrap it up in a custom viewer. It can then be distributed as an app for any tablet device or smart phone.

I was hooked by the how-to sessions on DPS and began planning to publish a book.

My children are both in a dual immersion school, and my daughter had just entered kindergarten when I attened the MAX conference. An alphabet book seemed like an appropriate and manageable undertaking.

The application is free. My aim is to learn and demonstrate an ability with the DPS tools, and to see what kind of reach I can garner.

I worked closely with my children's teachers and my wife, also dual immersion, teacher, to make this a useful and engaging educational resource.

Constructive comments are welcome

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Drawings were made using Adobe Illustrator, mostly with the chalk/charcoal pencils. All of the drawing began as black and white, and a splash of a single color was added later.

Letter Animations were created in Adobe After Effects and then exported to 2 second, 24 frame jpeg sequences for use in DPS as image sequence overlays.

Writing Canvas. This makes use of the new canvas tag in HTML5. Follow the link to read more and download the html code.

Audio Recorded at a professional studio and processed with Sony ProTools. Adobe Soundbooth was used to edit pieces together and save to the MP3 format required by DPS.

Layout. The book was designed using Adobe InDesign, then exported and previewed in the Adobe Content Viewer installed on each particular device.

Web Design for this page was done using Adobe Muse, and hosted by Business Catalyst which will enable data collection

Once I figured out how to do something, I only had to repeat it 29 more times.

Dan McSweeney

I live in Silicon Valley, California, and work as a systems engineer at Adobe Systems, Incorporated in San José. I have a BA in English from Santa Clara University where I have returned to teach photojournalism.

I am interested in digital publishing and short fiction. In 2011 I published my first short story, Their Constant Breathing, through Kindle Direct Publishing.

Thanks to my wife, who speaks Spanish, our children, 6 and 8 years old, are able to communicate easily in both Spanish and English.